Triaging refers to techniques for handling a long list of action items or issues based on assigned or perceived importance to their care. One area having a long list of action items for a user to handle is email. Email triage techniques are aimed towards helping a user to quickly go through unhandled email and deciding what actions to take with respect to those emails. For example, a user may act on the email—by reading all or a portion of the email, choosing to not read the email, sending a reply, forwarding the email, or performing some other task associated with the email such as writing another email or copying or modifying a document attached to the email. In some cases, a user handles multiple emails at the same time, for example, moving a batch of emails to a folder or trash.
A reviewing pane is one approach in a user interface to help a user make a decision whether the email is important and whether it should be handled immediately or can wait for a later date or time. Other functions included in user interfaces for triaging include grouping, flagging, searching and sorting. Efficient handling of long lists of items including emails continues to be an area for improvement to reduce the amount of time users spend processing their emails or other task items.